Crop advisors, growers, and other responsible entities have a need for creating variable rate applications for crops and fields, such as for example seeding, irrigation, and crop and soil treatment events. Growers engage crop advisors and/or access automated processes for decision-making or recommendation-writing to help define a set of management zones for these seeding events in a particular field. The crop advisor seeks to define these zones for a variable rate seeding application based on a set of logged crop yield data. This is used to create area views of a field with similar patterns.
This is accomplished using a multi-year yield analysis of selected crop yield data, in which one or more variables that influence or affect crop yield are evaluated. This multi-year yield analysis allows for the creation and definition of the management zones, and the writing of recommendations, for a particular field using such an evaluation of crop yield across multiple layers, or years, of event information. This approach may be accomplished in either a weighted analysis or a non-weighted analysis of the one or more variables.
However, there may not be sufficient yield events to produce accurate results using this approach. This could be due to a number of factors. For example, the crop advisor (or automated decision-making or recommendation-making process) may only have the last few years of yield data (or even less, for example only the last year) on the field. Particular yield event(s) may also be missing from the field history. Additionally, there may be no yield data for the particular field at all. Accordingly there is a need in the art for an approach that substitutes or replaces missing, logged yield event with representative data that approximates a yield event(s) for such a multi-year yield analysis.